Abstract:
The Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) was launched aboard the EOS-Aura satellite on July 15, 2004 (1:38 pm equator crossing time, ascending mode). OMI with its 2600 km viewing swath width provides almost daily global coverage. OMI is a contribution of the Netherlands Space Office (NSO) in collaboration with Finish Meterological Institute (FMI), to the US EOS-Aura Mission. The principal ... investigator (Dr. Pieternel Levelt) institute is the KNMI (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute). OMI is designed to monitor stratospheric and tropospheric ozone, clouds, aerosols and smoke from biomass burning, SO2 from volcanic eruptions, and key tropospheric pollutants (HCHO,NO2) and ozone depleting gases (OClO and BrO). OMI sensor counts, calibrated and geolocated radiances, and all derived geophysical atmospheric products will be archived at the NASA Goddard DAAC.

The Sulfer Dioxide Product 'OMSO2' from the Aura-OMI is now publicly available from NASA GSFC Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC) for public access. OMSO2 product contains three values of SO2 Vertical column corresponding to three a-priori vertical profiles used in the retrieval algorithm. It also contains quality flags, geolocation and other ancillary information.

(The shortname for this Level-2 OMI total column SO2 product is OMSO2) The algorithm leads for this product are NASA/UMBC OMI scientists Drs. Nikolay Krotkov (nickolay.a.krotkov@nasa.gov),Kai Yang(kai.yang@nasa.gov) and Arlin J. Krueger(krueger@umbc.edu).

OMSO2 files are stored in EOS Hierarchical Data Format (HDF-EOS5). Each file contains data from the day lit portion of an orbit (~53 minutes). There are approximately 14 orbits per day. The maximum file size for the OMSO2 data product is about 21 Mbytes. On-line spatial and parameter subset options are available during data download

A short OMSO2 Readme Document that includes brief algorithm description and documents that provides known data quality related issues are available from the UMBC OMI site ( http://so2.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs.php )

Description:
Near real-time (NRT) data are available from OMI for certain L2 and L3 products. Whereas the standard OMI forward processing acquires 2-hour L0 files from the GES DISC within 6-7 hours of real time, LANCE-OMI acquires session-based L0 files from EDOS and the end of the session is available within 10-30 minutes after real time.

Use Constraints
This Data set (version 003/second public release) is better than the earlier version but it is not fully validated yet. Before using it in any ... publication please contact algorithm team lead for the current known problems and updates. http://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/Aura/OMI/omso2_v003.shtml